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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Military Review, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Monday, July 11, 2016

The Donbas Front

Despite the existence of a ceasefire agreement, fighting in eastern Ukraine continues and is increasing. On July 5, three Ukrainian servicemen were killed and thirteen were wounded. The uptick in fighting began this past January, when Ukrainian officials reported up to seventy-one attacks a day and the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission noted the return of both Grad multiple-launch rocket systems and 152 mm artillery to the battlefield. Ukrainian military spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk reported that every third enemy attack came from a heavy weapon or mortar banned by the ceasefire agreement. ...

A senior US Department of Defense official told Foreign Policy in April that there were still seven thousand Russian troops inside Ukraine, advising the rebels and engaging in fighting themselves. “I think they can sustain this for a considerable period of time,” said the official.

Avdiivka, a Ukrainian held crossroads town about ten miles from rebel sock puppet-held Donetsk, appears to be the focus of Russian interest.

NATO’s collective security could likewise benefit from Ukraine’s experience and intelligence. Russia’s aggression on the eastern flank of NATO territory is an aggression not only against Ukraine, but the Western world. Yet no NATO member state has actual battlefield experience engaging with the modern Russian army. Ukraine does.

Ukraine needs our help to repel aggression that cannot stand as an accepted strategy for European affairs. And this will help NATO:

So long as the Kremlin can continue to ignite minor conflagrations in certain areas such as the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, it will use them as leverage to bully other countries.

Only a deeper partnership between NATO and Ukraine will foster stability in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Black Sea region and the transatlantic area as a whole. NATO’s support is a necessary part of the solution for defense and security threats in Ukraine.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday pledged sustained American support to Ukraine and offered assurances that the United States stands by the former Soviet republic in its territorial disputes with Russia and as it embarks on an ambitious program of reform.

Kerry met Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev to discuss progress on judicial, legislative, economic and anti-corruption efforts, and on agreements to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine with Russian-backed separatists. In 2014, Moscow annexed the Crimea Peninsula from Ukraine.

On Tuesday, Kerry visited neighboring Georgia, where he signed an agreement to boost U.S. military cooperation and sent a not-so-subtle message to Russia ahead of this week's NATO summit in Poland.

Failure of Ukraine to move more rapidly on the issue of reform to reduce corruption is no reason to punish Ukrainians by making them more vulnerable to Russian conquest.

The European Union may use that as an excuse to ease sanctions. But it is no good reason when the Donbas front is raging. This is a better theater for defeating Russia than Estonia, after all.

UPDATE: Strategypage has more. The Russians start most of the violence, but full-scale war seems unlikely:

Russia has brought more of its troops to the Ukrainian border, making it look like preparations for a major offensive. A closer look reveals that these troops are neither trained, equipped nor otherwise ready for a major offensive and neither is Russia.

Of course, Russia does have some trained and equipped forces sufficient to overwhelm a small opponent even if the majority of their army is poorly prepared to fight a decent opponent. So where is that stuff if not facing Ukraine?

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.